t by an investigation at the
printing-office. He nevertheless made no comments on the subject, nor,
loudly as he exclaimed against the abstraction of his letters, did he
breathe a whisper against the abstraction of the sheets of the
Wycherley. Not a single specimen, again, of the work of 1729 is now
known to exist, which is in some degree explained by its absorption into
the volume of 1735; but, on the supposition that the sheets transferred
to that volume were merely extra copies, struck off secretly for P. T.,
there is no reason why the Wycherley of 1729 should have disappeared.
The conflicting statement of Curll is not embarrassed by any of these
difficulties, and was never denied by either Gilliver or Pope, which is
of itself sufficient to establish its truth, when we bear in mind that,
instead of confronting calumny with silence, the poet denounced every
charge he could repel.

The letter urging Curll anew to make a false statement of the means by
which he obtained the correspondence, was received by him on the morning
of May 15. "I am," he said, in his reply, "just again going to the Lords
to finish Pope."[63] He verified his boast. In place of adopting the
advice of P. T., he showed the letter which contained it.[64] Pope's
double dealing had been strongly suspected on the previous day, when it
was discovered that the copies seized had been altered in anticipation
of the charge he preferred. There was now a second coincidence to
connect him with the plot. The letter produced by Curll revealed that
the correspondence had been taken from the archives of Lord Oxford, and
that the story Pope had volunteered to Caryll, and which he undoubtedly
reiterated to his friends among the Lords, was not only an invention to
conceal the truth, but the same invention which P. T. exhorted the
bookseller to adopt. Some step was necessary to save the poet from
discomfiture. He therefore put forth an advertisement in the "Daily
Post-boy," acknowledging, what he was no longer able to deny, that "some
of the letters could only be procured from his own library, or that of a
noble Lord," and promising twenty guineas to either Smythe or P. T. if
they would "discover the whole affair," and forty guineas if they "could
prove that they had acted by the direction of any other person."[65]
This was an old device of the poet. To escape from the obloquy he
incurred by an impious and indecent parody of the First Psalm, he
inserted an advertisemen